Anyone who lives in New York City (as I do) cannot have failed to notice that the city has been pushing a fairly extensive and well executed campaign to bolster tourism. A lot of this publicity has been centered around a serious of “Ask The Locals” advertisements and the “NYCgo” branding, with its nicely executed and very informative website. But a lesser noticed (and in my opinion much cooler) element in this campaign has been the complete renovation of the NYC Visitor Center on Madison Ave & 54th St, to include a very forward-thinking interactive experience based on multitouch tables.
These tables are built by GestureTek, a company we know well because they have been doing various types of gesture-based technologies for years. Some of the gesture-based technologies they have championed in the past (like waving hands in the air and such) have had limited utility, but their technologies seem well suited to touch tables. These tables are among the largest we have seen in action, and the touch sensitivity seems to be on par with systems we have worked with from other providers. But let’s step back a bit and consider the full experience, which goes beyond the tables themselves.
Somewhat unfortunately, the NYC Visitor is not easy to find unless you are really looking for it. For one thing its location, though central, is not exactly a tourist mecca (unless you happen to be staying at one the hotels across the street.) More importantly, though, construction on the exterior is not yet completed, so it’s currently pretty well hidden by scaffolding.
Once you get inside, however, the space is extremely well planned. The architectural and industrial design is impeccable – clean and elegant. The three touch tables share their form factor with two other tables – one at the front where you can pick up a coded disc to personalize your experience (more on that later) and another at the back that serves as a workspace for the center’s staff. Above each table element are shaped lightboxes that emit subtle colored light. The spacing of these elements is emphasized by grey and white stripes on the floor that curve up to the walls without a corner, looking similar to the long rolls of paper used for backgrounds in photo studios, lending the entire space a fairly artistic feel. The side walls house some literature racks and digital signage. At the far back wall is a large 16-screen video wall that provides ambient imagery and also shows the wrap-up experience (more on that later also.)
OK, so once you’ve taken in the space, the first thing you see is the table to your left that has little discs on it and instructions to take one. These discs have branding on the top and a black-and-white image on the bottom that is a fiducial – a unique code that can be recognized by the table. These discs are pretty similar to ones used by TacTable for the Sprint store experience.
A visitor can place one of these discs onto any of the three identical touch tables to initiate the table interaction. The basic functionality of the tables is to provide location-based information about various points of interest, placed onto an interactive map of the city. The navigation paradigm on the table is two-fold. When you put down a disc, it brings up a little rainbow of wedges around the disc, each of which is a menu option. In general, these options apply filters to a database of points of interest, and show the selected category of places on the map within a selected radius of your disc. There are also a couple of circles on the left. If you pick up your disc and put it into one of them, you get some canned content – lists of locations, Ask The Locals ads, etc. For any location tagged on the map, you can touch to see a pop-up with details about the place, and you can save it to your personal list of sites (keyed off the fiducial on your disc.)
While the visual design of this UI is quite appealing (in keeping with the aesthetics of the space), and while the tables were generally pretty satisfying to use, I did find this navigation to have some challenges. For one thing, centering the map’s search location on the disc, while logical, means that you can’t see the middle of your search area, because it’s under the disc. Also, all of the mapping is based on Google Earth, which is a nice economy in the development effort, but it makes the map indiscriminate between areas that are within New York City and areas that aren’t. On several occasions when I explored the details of sites in lower Manhattan, the map re-centered to make room for pop-up windows and left me looking at a map of Jersey City or Newark, which was a little disorienting, even to a native.
Another interesting thing to note is that despite the size of these tables, they are not at all multiuser. Their size (I would say about 60″ diagonal) makes it pretty much impossible to reach the far corners of the table. But because the interaction centers on moving the map around, it’s not really viable to allow multiple users on a single table. So it’s truly a single-user experience (per table.) Because of this, although the table easily supports many simultaneous touches, there is not much opportunity to utilize that functionality. Overall, however, this is a great application of interactive tabletop technology.
Another nice feature of the overall experience is the wrap-up and takeaway. After you’ve explored the city on a table, you can bring your disc to a little reader in the back which will initiate a virtual tour on the video-wall. Basically it starts as a fly-in to the earth and New York City and leads into a walking tour route of your selected sites. It’s fairly throwaway from a utility perspective but it is pretty cool to watch.
After your virtual tour, you can get a printout of your selected sites to take with you. Not as cool, but infinitely more useful (if you’re actually a tourist, I mean.) Combining the two makes for a satisfying payoff to the experience.
A final thing to note is that, while this experience is clearly designed to be self-guided, it rarely is in practice. The NYC Visitor Center is staffed with several people, and they are quick to help people figure out how to navigate the table. Touch tables, while maybe intuitive to the tech-savvy, are not always easily adopted by the general public.
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